so i'm back. but i'm leaving in a couple hours.

the weekend was good. great training. for everyone but me and my guys. so yes, there's a little bitterness about that, and we'll discuss that in a minute. got home safe'n'sound on tuesday without wrecking another car. maybe the jinx is lifted. came close once, but...



i've got several things i want to write about in the future:

-an absolutely wonderful someone who called "country" and "southern rock" the same thing.

-my earlier post about reasons not to date someone and people who are single past 35 or so.

-people who haven't learned the "don't judge someone unless you've walked a mile in their shoes" lesson in reference to non-catholics who bash the church, non vets who bash the military, etc...

-songs that stick in our heads from our "musically formative" years.

-those snapshots in time that remind you how far you've come and how old you've gotten


so. there are many ways to group people in the army. one method that the army likes is splitting them into two groups know as "combat/combat arms" and "combat support". the logic used to be you were either a trigger puller or else you supported the trigger pullers. commo guys like me, mechanics, medics, cooks, intel, supply guys and many others would all be known as combat support. great in theory. the reality of it though? as a commo guy i trained just as hard as the combat engineers i supported. learned to use alot of the same weapons and explosives that they did and could've been sent into combat with them. the bad guy wouldn't see my little antenna sticking up and say "wait, he's combat support, shoot the other guys first!", they'd see my antenna and say "oooh, shoot him first, cut them off from everyone else so they can't call for help". so it'd be in my best interest to shoot back and be just as effective as the combat engineers or the infantry guys i'm supporting. same goes for all the other support guys. and now, in iraq where it's more guerilla warfare instead of battle lines support guys are just as much at risk as anyone else. and guys who work in jobs that aren't as needed in this war as others are being retrained to perform infantry tasks. the lines are definately getting blurred and the army realized it and created the "combat action badge" to be awarded to non-infantry guys who are engaged in combat and perform well.

apparently no one has told my high headquarters about any of this though. we went out to cali to perform "battle focused training" for the "deploying soldiers". we've been doing this training here on our own for months, and have been doing it very effectively, but our battalion wanted us to come to california and go through it there as well. we were under the impression that they were going to be training us and were looking forward to going through the training lanes. when we got there we were told that we were still going to be training ourselves, that they were just there to "coordinate" and "observe" and "validate" our training. they wanted the headquarters section (me and my guys) to train the rest of the crew instead of going through the training with them. why? because they were "more at risk".

we were doing convoy skills training. in iraq the headquarters section put 2 as many miles on the vehicles as most of the teams. we were on the roads more and in many ways at much more risk than the teams. the teams usually operated in the same areas with close support whereas we supported ourselves and were frequently way out in hostile territory. some team guys were in much worse situations than i was. some weren't. and we have no idea what's going to happen this time around. but my guys are just as much at risk, and just as much in need of the training as the others.

we sucked it up and supported the others. it was still good for my new guys. they got to see alot of mistakes being made and hopefully learned from them. i did some good training, because while everyone else was focused on grading the guys on some of their psychological operations task i was watching what they were doing from a tactical standpoint and caught alot of (and corrected alot of) mistakes they were making tactically. i also got to put my guys in "leadership" roles and send them off on their own to make mistakes. so i got to develop some level of trust in their ability to act correctly in my absence. basically i'm going to end up having to carve out time and train us up on our own. which sucks. but to be honest we'll probably be tighter-knit for our troubles.